Behind-the-scenes tour at Longwood Gardens plant-production facility
October 09, 2023 The Philadelphia Area Fling in September officially started with a behind-the-scenes tour at Longwood Gardens. I didn’t know what to expect and was astonished to learn about an army of plant-production staff working at Longwood to grow horticultural displays that wow all year, but especially during big ...
Native plants at Chihuahuan Desert Botanical Garden in West Texas
August 22, 2023 Cow’s tongue prickly pear and Mitre Peak While visiting far West Texas last month, a few people mentioned the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center and its botanical garden, located just outside of Fort Davis. So one morning my friend and I drove over from Marfa to check it ...
Hot summer survivors and new book news
August 21, 2023 This summer, y’all. Am I right, my fellow Texas gardeners? But even with two months of surface-of-the-sun temps and zero rain, at least a few plants are happy. Like this pink-flowering mammillaria cactus that burst into silken bloom a few days after I gave it a deep ...
Surviving the record-breaking heat
July 20, 2023 Heat waves are everywhere all at once right now, and Austin too is broiling in the hottest July on record, according to KXAN. That’s saying something because last summer was incredibly hot. I felt sure, after enduring Snowpocalypse, last summer’s oven-like temps, and then February’s Arbormageddon ice ...
Read This: A garden care guide for DIYers in Central Texas
July 16, 2023 A couple years ago, Austin gardening expert Colleen Dieter handed me a “DIY zine for DIYers” she’d written and published in booklet form. Titled Let’s Care for Texas Plants, the 3-part series distills Colleen’s 12+ years of experience as a professional gardener into an easy-to-digest format for ...
Read This: Dry Climate Gardening
February 14, 2023 I’ve been following Noelle Johnson’s informative and entertaining garden blog, AZ Plant Lady: Ramblings From a Desert Garden, for more than a decade. As a horticulturist and landscape consultant in Phoenix, Noelle is an authority on native and desert-adapted plants suited to her hot, arid climate. Her ...
Designer Nick McCullough shares American Roots at Garden Spark
January 28, 2023 Austin garden lovers and designers turned out for Garden Spark on a chilly Thursday evening to hear Columbus-based designer Nick McCullough. Nick has a huge fan following across the U.S. and shared inspiring images and the stories of the gardens from his new book American Roots. I ...
Exploring Fortlandia’s creative hideouts
December 21, 2022 Chrysaline fort Each fall through winter, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center entices kids and kids at heart to explore a handful of creative “forts” built by Austin landscape architects, architects, designers, and artists. It’s called Fortlandia, and I always go see it. This year, because the ...
Read This: American Roots
December 03, 2022 A couple of years ago British gardening TV personality Monty Don made a 3-part series about U.S. gardens to answer the question, “What is an American garden?” Turns out, it’s an impossible question to answer satisfactorily in a country that spans a continent, 13 hardiness zones, and ...
Read This: The Lost Words, a spell book to bring nature back to life
November 10, 2022 For Christmas last year, I gave a book to my grown daughter that enchanted me when I paged through it in a bookstore in Maine. I carried it home and read it cover to cover, savoring its evocative poems about plants and animals and its magical illustrations, ...
Cynthia Deegan’s free-spirited, collected home and garden
November 01, 2022 The mossy green doors of Cynthia Deegan’s milagro-spangled garden gate opened to me again a week or so ago, when she generously invited me and Garden Spark speaker Teri Speight to come on over. What a treat to follow up our visit to Lucinda’s garden with Cynthia’s! ...
Lucinda’s Day of the Dead altars, a celebration of departed loved ones
October 30, 2022 Austin icon Lucinda Hutson‘s festive garden is always a joy to visit. But for the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead, she pulls out all the stops in her decorating. Smiling skeletons dangle from trees, gates, umbrellas, and the front porch. At night, purple lights give an ...
Teri Speight shares Black Flora stories at Garden Spark
October 22, 2022 Author Teri Speight came to Austin this week to share inspiring stories from her new book, Black Flora, at my Garden Spark speaker series. An enthusiastic audience came out to hear Teri’s talk under the big live oak at beautiful Barton Springs Nursery. Here are a few ...
Great turnout for Kinlers’ Garden Spark talk; next talk on sale now
September 26, 2022 Lorie and Michael Kinler of Kinler Landscape Architecture in Fort Worth brought their ideas for reimagining what a front yard can be to Austin for my Garden Spark series last Thursday, kicking off Season 6. They shared a number of design tips that I’ll be keeping in mind for ...
Read This: Black Flora
August 28, 2022 A few years ago I had the pleasure of attending a Texas-swing Field to Vase dinner at a flower farm in Blanco as the guest of Debra Prinzing, founder of Slow Flowers, which advocates for using American-grown flowers in the U.S. floral industry. Debra is also co-founder, ...
Read This: The Garden Refresh
June 22, 2022 Solstice, smolstice. Summer arrived in Texas back in early May, with a vengeance. We’ve had 16 triple-digit days already (unseasonably early) and little rain. For many avid gardeners this means sweaty mornings or mosquitoey evenings standing hose-in-hand over young plants stuffed willy-nilly into the garden during the ...
